Bitcoin network congestion has eased, but concerns remain about its future

The only practical way for users to clear the backlog of Bitcoin transactions today is to increase transaction fees. However, this is not a positive direction in which Bitcoin should evolve.

The past 24 hours have been a chaotic and painful 24 hours for the Bitcoin ecosystem. The Bitcoin network has a backlog of 43,500 unconfirmed transactions in just one day. It couldn’t be worse. It seems that the memory pool urgently needs to process some unconfirmed transfers. And another severe warning is that Bitcoin cannot wait to expand.

This is not the first time that a large number of unconfirmed transactions have reached the headache threshold. In the past few months, there have been multiple incidents of unconfirmed transactions in the memory pool. Most of these incidents indicate that the network blocks can no longer carry more transactions.

Another unconfirmed transaction backlog event

The only practical way for users to clear the backlog of Bitcoin transactions today is to increase transaction fees. However, this is not a positive direction that Bitcoin should evolve in. Proposals for larger blocks were raised some time ago, and solutions are being developed as we speak.

Until this solution is implemented on the mainnet, these network congestion incidents make the future of Bitcoin as a means of transaction somewhat worrying. No one likes to wait for hours for a transaction to be confirmed when payment processors give buyers the option of zero confirmation. Although, you can manually select a higher fee when sending the same transaction, this is not a better solution.

Fortunately, the number of unconfirmed transactions stuck in the memory pool has begun to decrease rapidly. A few hours ago, the number dropped from 43,000 to 33,000. This means that everything has returned to normal on the Bitcoin network. However, this transaction backlog once again reminds us how urgent the expansion situation is.

As the saying goes, it is difficult to please everyone. There is no block size that can satisfy all community members. Chinese miners want to keep small blocks, while other miners in the world don't mind the exponential growth of block sizes. Now that the Bitcoin network memory has dropped again, everything seems to be happy. But this state will definitely be broken at some point in the future.